ABUJA  – The World Health Or­ganisation (WHO) has appealed to Africans to take necessary medi­cal precautions on drug management and ad­ministration, saying the global and regional bur­den of antimicrobials is becoming alarming.

It would be recalled that in 2019, WHO Re­gional Director for Afri­ca, Dr Matshidiso Moeti hinted that 4.95 million deaths globally were at­tributed to drug-resis­tant bacterial infections, with 1.27 million direct­ly related to AMR – more than HIV/AIDS and ma­laria combined.

Compared to other re­gions, WHO stated that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest AMR-asso­ciated death rates, at 99 deaths per 100 0001 popu­lation, far exceeding pre­vious global projections of 700 000 annual deaths from AMR.

Moeti made this known in her message to commemorate the 2022 World Antimicro­bial Awareness Week on Friday in Abuja. The week starts from 18 to 24 November every year, to raise awareness of the risks posed by the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials, includ­ing antibiotics, and to encourage their more responsible use.

In the spirit of the One Health approach, this year’s theme, “Prevent­ing Antimicrobial Resis­tance Together”, calls for urgent multisectoral action to preserve the ef­ficacy of this fundamen­tal component of modern medicine.

According to her, “Compounding the chal­lenge is that more than half of all deaths record­ed in the WHO African Region are caused by communicable diseases managed with antimi­crobial medicines. As such, AMR puts at risk decades of advances to­ward the control of dis­eases such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections.

“Various reports also suggest that the man­agement of COVID-19 patients with antibiot­ics has fueled the global AMR threat.

“While AMR does oc­cur naturally, the con­cern lies with the current high rates of develop­ment and spread. Other than misuse and overuse of antimicrobials in hu­man and animal health. Other drivers include limited availability and uptake of vaccines; lim­ited diagnostic capacity to support appropriate treatment; lack of ac­cess to clean water, sani­tation and hygiene; poor infection prevention and control practices; poor disposal practices; and the presence of antimi­crobials in the environ­ment and water bodies.

“Antimicrobial re­sistance (AMR), known more commonly as ‘drug resistance’, occurs when disease-causing germs become resistant to tra­ditional medication, making infections hard­er to treat, and increas­ing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death.”